Rethinking purpose and function

Kress’s text has caused me to rethink the notions of agency, audience, purpose, and function in visual rhetoric. While I recognized, prior to reading Multimodality, that an artifact could be rhetorical for one audience and not another, that an audience had agency to decide the rhetorical capacities of an artifact, I still saw the greater amount of agency as belonging to the creator of the artifact, not the audience.  In my pre-Kress mind, the creator makes a series of choices during the formation of an artifact.  These choices are based upon the creator’s conception of the audience, the creator’s purpose for the artifact, and the surrounding contextual situation. How accurately the creator conceives of his/her intended audience directly correlates with the rhetorical impact (the function) of an artifact.

While Kress’s text didn’t cause me to reject the above ideas, his emphasis on the agency of the audience has caused me to reconsider how I understand the role of agency and audience in visual rhetoric.  Repeatedly, Kress emphasizes the agentive action of the audience as central to meaning.  The meaning of a multimodal artifact, according to Kress, rests on the interests and needs of a given audience.  Instead of the power for rhetorical meaning residing with the choices a creator makes in the creation of a text, it seems that the power rests with the audience: “‘Reading’ is now a matter of the design of the ‘page’ or the ‘screen’ by the reader. That suggests – and projects – a different disposition for the reader or learner, a different identity to one which is expected to follow a predetermined path” (176). 

My pre-Kress mind asks, ‘But doesn’t the design of a page guide a readers interest? Isn’t there always some elements of a predetermined path? Is Kress giving all agency to the readers?’

A little further down the page, Kress acknowledges the power of the designer/creator: “An exhibition [of a museum] is designed; its designer(s) have specific aims: not just to show objects, images, reconstructions, or to tell stories of the prehistory of the nation; they have specific social purposes in mind” (176).

Again, my pre-Kress mind responds, ‘So, if Kress recognizes the role of the creator here, why does he continue to focus so much on the agency of a given audience?  Why is the reader’s interests positioned so centrally? Regardless of a reader’s interests, wouldn’t a reader’s familiarity with the conventions of the museum genre [to continue the above example] impact how the reader interacts with an exhibition, their reading path, and how they choose to navigate their interests and needs?’

I don’t want to criticize and question Kress’s emphasis on the agentive power of the audience while clinging tightly to my own previous notions.  I want to add his ideas to my understanding because I have found the vast majority of his text insightful and exciting.  

So, what does this focus on an audience’s agency add to my understanding of visual rhetoric? For me, it blurs the boundary between purpose and function.  As a class, we’ve often discussed purpose (as decided by the author/creator/designer) and function (as decided by the audience)– and how purpose doesn’t always align with function.  However, Kress’s perspective has led me to consider purpose and function in a new way.  Perhaps purpose and function are not separate entities; perhaps both purpose and function are defined by the audience; that is, the purpose of an artifact is based upon how it functions with a given audience, the ways in which an audience interprets an artifact. Maybe the purpose (as separate from the function and defined by the creator during the creation of an artifact) is arbitrary; why does it matter what the creator intended? Perhaps it only matters how an artifact is interpreted and received by an audience, regardless of the creator’s original intention(s).

This line of thinking asks us to redefine what we mean by purpose and function, and I think that a lot of what Kress offers is a redefinition/reconceptualization/reconfiguration of how we see and discuss visual artifacts and communication.  Additionally, maybe thinking about the act of redefining can help with Logan’s concern that we need to immediately adapt education, assessment, and pedagogy in light of Kress’s claims.  For example, instead of teaching visual arts instead of Language Arts, as Logan states in his example, for example, maybe what Kress’s text asks us to do is redefine what we mean by “Language Arts” and what this pedagogy encompasses.